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Machu Picchu

Machu Picchu
Peru

Sunday, September 5, 2010

BOLIVIAN MUSINGS

How to describe the lessons, the experiences, the raw humanity that seeps and spills on every corner...no such thing as just living, it is all about surviving.
2 months of walking, eyes ripped open, looking to see...loving the ugly and the beauty, the tangible, audible, sensory assaulting LIFE that is here.
The overwhelming colour and noise, the vibrancy and life, homeless eating at my ankles, festering and pitiful, empty, soulless eyes, parading with trumpets, tradition, cymbals...clashing and banging.
Never have I seen such poverty, suffering...base humanity.  What does it take sit at the feet of pedestrians, shunned and spurned, offering a shoe polish? For a young teenager to board a bus of tourists and sing off pitch desperate to earn 1 boliviano (20 cents), amidst the groans, smothered laughs and blocked ears? A 5 year old racing to beat the light changes at intersections, wielding a filthy mop to wash windows of cars that rev and beep...threating to run him down...tiny, barely out of nappies.
Part of me is hardened to it all, its impossible to give something to everyone, yet at the same time, how can I escape the niggling, gut wrenching grief that tugs at the very sight of these broken, soulless children?
God is here? Where? In the eyes of those who are compassionate, round every corner, fighting through the smoke of witches offerings, kneeling at our feet with the beggars...its hard to keep faith in the eyes of such appalling despair.
My love affair with Bolivia is not derived solely from the romantic setting, the jaw dropping scenery...but in the mad chaos that is human existence here...no sterility, chaos, smells that render me heaving and watery eyed, sights that tear and rip at my conscience, the need and pain that permeates most...